Next year, Facebook will discontinue two of its well-known external social plugins. The platform’s Like and Share buttons, which website owners have used for years, will stop working on February 10, 2026. A blog post from Meta, Facebook’s parent company, states that the website
Administrators don’t need to do anything special because of this change. However, they can choose to remove the plugins themselves before the end date. Any buttons left on the site will become invisible.
Ending support for these features marks a big moment for Meta and Facebook. The company first introduced these external Like and Share buttons in 2010. Back then, Facebook promoted these tools as a way for websites to get more visitors through the social network. At that time, many people relied on Facebook to share and discover articles online.
Meta’s official explanation is that these plugins “reflect an earlier era of web development, and their usage has naturally declined as the digital landscape has evolved.” This means the way people use the internet has changed a lot since these buttons first appeared.
Beyond that, Facebook itself plays a much smaller part in Meta’s overall business operations than it once did. Also, it’s no longer common to see websites that feature integration with only a single social network. Most sites today offer sharing options for many different platforms, showing how the internet has grown and diversified. So, while these buttons were a big deal once, their time has passed as the web has evolved.
